We've Already Spent the Money

Tuesday's Council meeting ran three hours and twenty-nine minutes and adjourned at 9:29 p.m., one minute before the Council's own curfew would have required a motion to keep going — the civic equivalent of sliding under the garage door. In that time the Council authorized a $7.6 million loan for roadwork that is already finished, appointed to the budget committee a man whose committee process had been publicly questioned minutes earlier, and sent $15,000 to Newport to help sue the federal government. It was, in other words, a full evening.

The Loan for the Road That Exists

Start with the item this paper cannot stop admiring. Resolution 2026-04: authorization to borrow $7,622,963 from the state infrastructure bank, at 2.77 percent through 2042, for the North Mountain Avenue rehabilitation. Councilor Bloom, reading the loan agreement rather than the summary, noted the packet said the food and beverage tax would repay it, while the agreement itself also pledges the street user fee and "the full faith and credit of the borrower." Then he stated the fact plainly, so nobody could later claim it was hidden: "I just wanted it to be clearly stated out loud. We've already spent the money." City Manager Sabrina Cotta confirmed: "We've already spent the money."

The Council thus voted on whether to borrow money for work already performed and paid for, which is less a decision than a séance. It passed 5-1, Councilor DuQuenne dissenting after asking what phase two costs and being told: "I do not have that information."

The Forum Wanted Blood, and Got Weeds

Seventeen people signed up for public forum against a fifteen-minute cap, so democracy was rationed at one minute per citizen. Within those minutes: a resident called the campaign against the city manager "an exercise in administrative idiocy"; another demanded an executive session "to place the city manager on administrative leave"; Paul Mina alleged the Council's 2025 budget amendment drew a reprimand from the Oregon Department of Revenue — an allegation, we note, that no one on the dais addressed then or later.

And Jeannie Martin, who lived on the night lawn and announced two years clean and sober to scattered applause, described reporting a rape in progress and being told by an officer, as she recounted it, "no victim, no crime." Her summary of the division of civic labor deserves the record: "while Ava's at all the high schools teaching all your future non rapists, I have to listen to the victims and the survivors all day long at the library and in the streets because the police won't." This came minutes after the Council had warmly received the Jackson County SART presentation on sexual assault services. The juxtaposition was not engineered by this paper. It walked in the door on its own.

The forum's one same-night victory: William Zentner and four others protested glyphosate spraying scheduled for the next morning in front of City Hall, beside the night lawn, across from a children's park. By the time the Council returned from recess, the city manager reported the spraying "on pause." Two hours from testimony to result — a velocity this Council has never once achieved on housing, and residents may draw their own conclusions about which complaints are load-bearing.

The People's House, Partially Returned

The community center — reopened after seven years of waiting, then promptly occupied by city staff relocated from the crumbling City Hall — got its resolution: public and civic uses reserved, administrators out of the main rental spaces by June 1, staff permitted to keep the designed office areas. Passed 5-1. DuQuenne, dissenting because she wanted the whole building back, gave the evening its epigraph: "I don't think we stepped in it, I think we stepped up to it... that's the people's house." Also disclosed along the way: the building cannot actually be rented yet because all the doors are wrong — "they're all wrong" — and the city manager "does not have control of the doors." Somewhere in that sentence is a metaphor this paper declines to belabor.

The 2200 Ashland Street committee's homeless-services recommendations passed unanimously, though not before Kate Hartzell testified that "it's mostly the chair that authored the recommendation... there was no vote of the full committee on the final draft." The Council then, in its very next act, appointed that chair to the Citizens Budget Committee through 2029. Efficiency.

Go Get Him

The evening's finest hour came last. The mayor of Newport — no relation to Councilor Kaplan, established on the record — described the federal government quietly assembling an ICE detention facility by his airport: job ads for detention workers, requests to lease two hundred hotel rooms, a request to haul ten thousand pounds of human waste a week, and three months of litigation before ICE would admit in discovery what it was building. Eight hundred people attended a community meeting in a city of ten thousand.

Ashland's Council voted unanimously to send $15,000 — the top of the estimated range, possibly overspending the line, nobody minded. Councilor Hansen: "I didn't go to a training or a conference this year. So you can have my full allocation." DuQuenne: "I am behind you at 199%." Bloom's entire floor speech, in full: "Go get him."

One more thing, and then we let the evening rest. Dr. John Mauer told the forum that as of May 9th, Ashland's hospital would be in default and no longer a general hospital, its birthing center gone. He was escorted out of that hospital for gathering petition signatures. One minute, one chime, and not one syllable in response from the dais all night. The biggest story in the room was the one nobody on it would touch.

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Sourced from machine-generated closed captions of the May 5, 2026 Ashland City Council business meeting. Quotations appear as transcribed; the caption software recycles speaker labels, so names are attached only where the chair's own words or self-identification confirm the speaker. Allegations made in public testimony are reported as testimony. Figures are as stated in open session.